[andybak]

Grapelli chose not to stick to pure CSS. It's not a trade-off I think was worth it as they have no cut themselves off from much of the 3rd party admin extension ecosystem - unless those apps actively do a 'Grapelli version'

Pure CSS skins are a bit more work and you occasionally have to choose between overriding more template code than you'd like - or doing a sneak bit of jQuery DOM manipulation - but it's a better bet long term.

A really simple fix for the core Django team would be to add a heap of {% block %} tags into admin templates so that we can selectively inherit and override.